High resolution outdoor videography of insects using fast lock-on tracking

Insects have significant global impacts on ecology, economy, and health and yet our understanding of their behavior remains limited. Bees, for example, use vision and a tiny brain to find flowers and return home, but understanding how they perform these impressive tasks has been hampered by limitations in recording technology. Here we present Fast Lock-On (FLO) tracking. This method moves an image sensor to remain focused on a retroreflective marker affixed to an insect. Using paraxial infrared illumination, simple image processing can localize the sensor location of the insect in a few milliseconds. When coupled with a feedback system to steer a high magnification optical system to remain focused on the insect, a high spatial-temporal resolution trajectory can be gathered over a large region. As the basis for several robotic systems, we show FLO is a versatile idea which can be employed in combination with other components. We demonstrate that the optical path can be split and used for recording high-speed video. Furthermore, by flying a FLO system on a quadcopter drone, we track a flying honey bee and anticipate tracking insects in the wild over kilometer scales. Such systems have the capability of providing higher resolution information about insects behaving in natural environments and as such will be helpful in revealing the biomechanical and neuroethological mechanisms used by insects in natural settings.

Methods
This dataset consists of files collected throughout the development of the Fast Lock-On (FLO) tracking technique. The publication "High Resolution Outdoor Videography of Insects Using Fast Lock-On Tracking" describes the methods in full detail. In brief, the FLO software was used as a key aspect of collecting all data together with FLO robotic hardware.

There were two main robotic hardware implementations used. First was the "Bring Your Own" (BYO) camera setup where a high-speed (over 1000 fps possible) camera. For this high-speed, high-resolution video, we used a long focal length macro lens (Nikon AF Micro Nikkor 200mm f/4D) and camera (Mikrotron MotionBlitz EoSens mini1).  This camera was viewing the subject (typically an insect) through mirrors and a focus control motor that were controlled by FLO. The primary video recordings were recorded by this high-speed camera.

The second FLO robotic hardware implementation was mounted on a quadcopter (Holybro X500 V2) carrying a gimbal-mounted stereo camera pair. In this case, video was recorded by the infrared tracking cameras (Basler ace 2 a2A1920-160umBAS), the first person view (FPV) camera used by the quadcopter pilot (DJI O3 recorded on DJI Goggles 2), a consumer camera (Sony RX10 IV) operated manually.

The high-speed videos recorded by the Mikrotron camera were encoded with HandBrake to reduce file size.

Video from tracking cameras used by Strand Camera were recorded live.

.floz files were recorded by FLO.